Video Game Matches to Be Televised on CBS

An image from Guitar Hero II, one of the video games in CBSs broadcast. The other two are World of Warcraft and Fight Night Round 3.

The magic of television has already transformed everything from motorcycle acrobatics to poker into living-room spectator sports, not to mention turning competitive singing into a national obsession. Next on the list: video games.

Tomorrow at noon, CBS, the august home of the Masters and March Madness, will become the first broadcast network in the United States to cover a video game tournament as a sporting event.

So viewers flicking channels looking for a ballgame or golf tournament may instead encounter a couple of young guys rocking out on plastic guitars, or some (literally) disembodied digital boxers throwing uppercuts, or a fanciful animated wizard casting a spell.

“Who knows, in 10 years we could be looking back on this as a very significant moment,” said Rob Correa, senior vice president for programming at CBS Sports. The network’s broadcast will consist of edited moments from the World Series of Video Games tournament, held in Louisville, Ky., last month.

“There are an enormous amount of people of all ages who play video games these days, so we’re going to try to see if video games’ popularity can translate into a viable television audience,” Mr. Correa said.

CBS’s broadcast suggests it can. This is not the first time video game coverage has appeared on television. Cable networks like Spike, ESPN and USA have occasionally shown game coverage (to modest ratings), and smaller networks like G4 and Gameplay HD have carved out a niche by focusing on gaming culture.

Still, for most of the last two decades gaming has been considered an odd, insular subculture, the territory of teenage boys and those who never outgrew their teens. But now, as the first generation of gamers flirts with middle age, and as family-friendly game systems like Nintendo’s Wii infiltrate living rooms around the country, video games are beginning to venture beyond geekdom into a region approaching the mainstream.

The dollars are already quite mainstream. Americans bought about $13 billion worth of video game systems and software last year, more than they spent at the film box office (around $10 billion). Advertisers for Sunday’s broadcast include KFC, Intel and the Marines.

But for gaming to make it as a major-network TV sport, the big hurdle will be translating a medium that is by its nature meant to be experienced firsthand into a compelling hands-off spectator experience. It is a task that in some ways is no less daunting than that of the early baseball television producers who eventually realized that a camera way out in center field would provide the best view of pitches.

“Without a doubt the biggest question is: How do you make watching the television show fun for a viewer who’s not actually playing the game?” Mr. Correa said. “Clearly video games have always been a participant sport, if you will, and that’s going to be the challenge.”

Photo

Freddie Wong participated in the Guitar Hero II competition.Credit
Dave Evans/World Series of Video Games

In a windowless editing suite in Chelsea last week, a video editor named Jesse Gordon was working on the CBS footage. Hovering over a blinking control console, he spun a video clip forward and back. On a small constellation of screens, a mage, a priest and a rogue — characters in the game World of Warcraft — burst into a castle courtyard in search of an enemy.

It was a scene that would have been instantly familiar to millions of gamers. It was not, however, one that would initially make any sense to millions of sports television watchers.

And so, along the bottom third of the screen, Mr. Gordon had added six fat red health meters, like digital fuel gauges, reflecting the fortunes of the game’s players. For anyone actually playing the game, the same information would be conveyed by just a few minuscule pixels tucked in a corner of the screen.

Other assists for those unfamiliar with gaming will include explanatory boxes on screen (“Iceblock: a spell that encases a player in ice, protecting him from enemy spells”), play-by-play announcers and hosts, like Greg Amsinger and Susie Castillo, better known, respectively, for college sports shows and MTV’s “Total Request Live.”

The producers have even tweaked some of the games’ rules to make them more viewer-friendly. For example, in Guitar Hero II, players are normally scored on how accurately they pretend to play the notes for various rock anthems. But for the broadcast, a score from a showmanship judge has been factored into the result. Naturally, the crowd goes wild.

“Every sport and every entertainment medium has to be presented differently, and we’re just starting to figure out what works for video games,” said Matthew Ringel, president of Games Media Properties, the company that produced the World Series of Video Games, the finals of which CBS is broadcasting.

“The audience knows how to watch a music video. They know how to watch boxing. And now all of a sudden they’re in this fantasy world. So we need to bring them into that world and give them the help they need to understand what’s happening.”

Not coincidentally, the other two games in tomorrow’s broadcast most resemble a music video (Guitar Hero II) and a boxing match (Fight Night Round 3). What will not be seen are violent shooting games like Halo and Quake; CBS was adamant that on a Sunday afternoon on broadcast television, only relatively tame games would suffice.

While representatives for the other major broadcast networks said they had no plans to cover video games as a sporting event, CBS is planning to broadcast at least two more video game programs this year.

For gamers, the national model to emulate is South Korea, where video games are one of the dominant pop-culture pastimes and where there are at least three full-time video game television networks akin to ESPN. But for now, they and the rest of the viewing public will have to make do with this first attempt at making games a mass spectacle.

A picture caption on Saturday with an article about the first time a video-game tournament would be shown on American broadcast television misidentified a contestant competing in the Guitar Hero II portion of the games. He is Freddie Wong, not David Briers.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B7 of the New York edition with the headline: Video Game Matches To Be Televised on CBS. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe